Category Archives: Speaking with the Stars

High notes of intention

Insight, Poetry, Quote, Remembering, Rudolf Steiner Quote, Soul to Soul, Speaking with the Stars

27 April 2017 – Astro-Weather: Look for the thin crescent Moon low just after sunset. Gaze below Aldebaran & Mars there in the west-northwest in the twilight

Today the Moon also reaches perigee, the closest point in its orbit around Earth. Try to glimpse an ashen light faintly illuminating the Moon’s dark side. This is “earthshine,” – sunlight reflected by Earth that reaches the Moon & then reflects back to our waiting eyes

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Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Feast day of Our Lady of Montserrat – One of the Black Madonnas of Europe, (“the little dark-skinned one” or “the little dark one”)- Believed by some to have been carved in Jerusalem in the early days of the Church. The Patron Saint of Catalonia, an honor she shares with Saint George. The famed image once bore the inscription ”Negra Sum Sed Formosa” (Latin: I am Black, but Beautiful).

The hymn to the Virgin of Montserrat, known as “el Virolai” is sung at noon on her feast day & begins with the words: “Rosa d’abril, Morena de la serra…” (April rose, dark-skinned lady of the mountain…). Therefore, this virgin is sometimes also known as the “Rosa d’abril”

Feast Day of St. Zita, the Italian patron saint of maids, often appealed to in order to help find lost keys. Born in Tuscany in the village of Monsagrati, not far from Lucca. At the age of 12, she became a servant in the Fatinelli household. For a long time, she was unjustly despised, overburdened, reviled, & often beaten by her employers & fellow servants for her hard work & obvious goodness. The abuse did not deprive her of her inward peace, & her love of those who wronged her. Her faith gradually moved the family to a religious awakening.

Zita often said to others that devotion is false if slothful. She considered her work assigned to her by God. She always rose several hours before the rest of the family to pray.

One anecdote relates a story of Zita giving her own food to the poor. One morning, Zita left her chore of baking bread to tend to someone in need. Some of the other servants told on her & when they went to investigate, they claimed to have found angels in the kitchen, baking the bread for her.

St. Zita died peacefully in her sleep & a star appeared above the attic where she lay. After 150 miracles were proven, she was canonized in 1696.

Her body was exhumed in 1580, discovered to be incorrupt, but has since become mummified. St. Zita’s body is currently on display for public veneration in the Basilica di San Frediano in Lucca.

On her feast day families bake a loaf of bread in her honor.

470 – Birthday of Socrates – teacher of Plato. “Socrates gathers his pupils around himself, but how does he feel in relation to them? His manner of treating these pupils has been called the art of a spiritual midwife because he wished to draw out from the souls of his pupils what they themselves knew, and what they were to learn. He put his questions in such a manner that the fundamental inner mood of the souls of his pupils was stirred to movement. He transmitted nothing from himself to his pupils, but elicited everything from them. The somewhat dry and prosaic aspect of Socrates’ view of the world and the way he presented it comes from the fact that Socrates actually appealed to the independence and to the innate reasoning power of every pupil.” ~Rudolf Steiner, Gospel of Mark: Lecture 4

399 BC – Deathday of Socrates 

711 – Tarik ibn Ziyad, (who according to the spiritual scientific research of Rudolf Steiner in Karmic relationships Vol. 1 Chapter 10, reincarnated as Darwin) leads his army into Gibraltar

1667 – John Milton, blind & impoverished, sells the copyright of Paradise Lost for 10 pounds

1882 – Deathday of R.W.Emerson essayist, lecturer, & poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism & a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, & he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays & more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.

Emerson gradually moved away from the religious & social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating & expressing the philosophy of transcendentalism in his 1836 essay “Nature”. Following this work, he gave a speech entitled “The American Scholar” in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. considered to be America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence”.

Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first & then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays, Essays: First Series (1841) & Essays: Second Series (1844), represent the core of his thinking. They include the well-known essays “Self-Reliance”, “The Over-Soul”, “Circles”, “The Poet” &”Experience”. Together with “Nature”, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson’s most fertile period.

Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for humankind to realize almost anything, & the relationship between the soul & the surrounding world. Emerson’s “nature” was more philosophical than naturalistic: “Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul”. Emerson is one of several figures who “took a more pantheist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world.”

He remains among the linchpins of the American romantic movement, & his work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers & poets that followed him. When asked to sum up his work, he said his central doctrine was “the infinitude of the private man.” Emerson is also well known as a mentor & friend of Henry David Thoreau, a fellow transcendentalist.

(Spoken of by Rudolf Steiner as Tacitus in Vol 2 lecture 5, of Karmic Relationships. Tacitus was considered to be one of the greatest Roman historians. He lived in what has been called the Silver Age of Latin literature, & is known for the brevity & compactness of his Latin prose, as well as for his penetrating insights into the psychology of power politics )

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POD (Poem Of the Day)

~The Moon gate is freshly oiled
A Scythe cutting a way
Thru Mystery
Reverberating in my swelling heart
With high notes of intention
& the will toward freedoms mind…
~hag

Wrought with a kiss

Poetry, Remembering, Speaking with the Stars

26 April 2017 – Astro-Weather: Bella Luna is hidden in Her New Moon phase. She crosses the sky with the Sun & so remains secreted in our star’s glare

Sandra Ventren

Jupiter, the benevolent King, resides among the background stars of Virgo, northwest of Spica. To the left of Jupiter -about three fists at arm’s length – shines Arcturus, pale yellow-orange.

Jeremiah Briggs

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Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

1721 – A massive earthquake devastates the Iranian city of Tabriz. Many prominent mosques & schools in the city were destroyed, resulting in the deaths of over 250,000 people.  At the time that it occurred, the earthquake was popularly interpreted as an omen of misfortune, or a demonstration of godly wrath. The destruction that the earthquake caused was a significant factor in the successful Ottoman takeover of Tabriz in 1722, as well as contributing to Tabriz’s economic difficulties during that period.  It also caused the destruction of some of the city’s significant historical monuments

1803 – Thousands of meteors fall from the skies in L’Aigle, France; the event convinces European scientists that meteors exist. In the early afternoon a meteorite shower of more than 3000 fragments fell. Upon hearing of this event the French Academy of Sciences sent the young scientist Jean-Baptiste Biot to investigate that spectacular fall of stones. After painstaking work in the field he reported how these stones must undoubtedly be of extraterrestrial origin effectively gave birth to the science of meteoritics. The L’Aigle event was a real milestone in the understanding of meteorites & their origins because at that time the mere existence of meteorites was harshly debated, if they were recognized their origin was controversial.

1933 – The Gestapo, the secret police force of Nazi Germany, is established

1966 – The magnitude 5.1 earthquake affects the largest city in Soviet Central Asia. Tashkent is destroyed & over 300 people are killed.

1986 – Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Ukraine

1989 – The deadliest tornado in world history strikes Central Bangladesh, killing upwards of 2,300, injuring 22,000, & leaving as many as 180,000 homeless

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Jill Hardcastle

POD (Poem Of the Day)

~No fear is here
As I gather the serpents to my breast
Speaking their names I take their venom…
Burning with holy fire
I vomit the evil
Wrought with a kiss
Turning the poison into medicine
Smelting my words unto gold
In the eternal dance I twine the snakes into my DNA –
Now death lives on my forehead
Side by side with light
~hag

Linger

Poetry, Quote, Remembering, Speaking with the Stars

25 April 2017 – Astro-Weather: Look west after darkness falls tonight &you’ll witness the beginning of the winter sky’s decline. By 8:30 pm CDT the lower tier of bright winter stars & constellations barely clears the horizon. Sirius in Canis Major, Aldebaran in Taurus, and the three belt stars of Orion the Hunter all hang low in the west. Still, a higher tier of winter stars remains prominent. Look for Capella in Auriga, Castor & Pollux in Gemini, & Procyon in Canis Minor to keep winter on your mind & in the sky for several weeks to come.

Sandy Dooley

“If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful flowers, what might not the heart become in the long journey towards the stars?”~ G K Chesterton

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David Dunlop

Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Feast of St. Mark the Evangelist, founded the Church of Alexandria. The oldest & the shortest of the four Gospels, the Gospel of Mark emphasizes the rejection of Christ by humanity while being God’s triumphant envoy.

A winged lion is Mark’s symbol. The lion derives from Mark’s description of John the Baptist as a “voice of one crying out in the desert” (Mark 1:3), which artists compared to a roaring lion. The wings come from the application of Ezekiel’s vision of four winged creatures (Ezekiel, chapter one) to the evangelists.

“…This is how it is with the kingdom of God; it is as if a man were to scatter seed on the land and would sleep and rise night and day and the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how. Of its own accord the land yields fruit, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. And when the grain is ripe, he wields the sickle at once, for the harvest has come” (Mark 4:26-29)

1599 – Birthday of Oliver Cromwell, political leader & Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, & Ireland. Nicknamed “Old Ironsides. Cromwell was born into the middle gentry. He was an intensely religious man, a self-styled Puritan Moses, & he fervently believed that God was guiding his victories.

Cromwell was one of the signatories of King Charles I’s death warrant in 1649

Cromwell is one of the most controversial figures in the history of the British Isles, considered a regicidal dictator by historians, a military dictator by Winston Churchill, but a hero of liberty by John Milton, Thomas Carlyle, & Samuel Rawson Gardiner, & a class revolutionary by Leon Trotsky

1875 – Death-Day of the 12th Dalai Lama -Trinley Gyatso. His short life coincided with a time of major political unrest & wars in Tibet which particularly suffered from the weakening of the Qing Dynasty.

During his period of training as a child, Tibet banned Europeans from entering the country because of wars Britain was fighting against Sikkim & Bhutan, both of whom were controlled to a considerable degree by the lamas in Lhasa. These wars were seen as efforts to colonize Tibet—something seen as unacceptable by the lamas.

Trinley Gyatso was fully enthroned as Dalai Lama on 11 March 1873 but could not stamp his full authority on Tibet because he died of a mysterious illness

1917 – Birthday of Ella Fitzgerald, American singer

2015 – Over 9,100 are killed after a massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake strikes Nepal

2015 – Riots break out in Baltimore, Maryland following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody

Red Hat Society Day, an international social organization that was founded in 1998 for women age 50 &over, but now open to women of all ages.

In the fall of 1997, Sue Ellen Cooper, an artist from Fullerton, California, purchased an old red fedora for $7.50 from a thrift shop during a trip to Tucson, Arizona. When a good friend was nearing a 55th birthday, Cooper cast about for an idea for an original gift. Inspired by a well-known Jenny Joseph poem, “Warning”, which begins “When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple, with a red hat which doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me.” Cooper wanted to encourage her friend to grow older in a playful manner. She gave her friend a red hat of her own suggesting that she keep it as a reminder to grow older on her terms.

The symbolism behind the red hat affected women Cooper encountered. Those women responded by wearing their own red hats & entering a new women’s movement that embraced a renewed outlook on life filled with fun & friendship, fulfilling lifelong dreams.

Cooper repeated the gift on request several times, & eventually several of the women bought purple outfits & held a tea party on April 25, 1998, at which the Red Hat Society began.

After spreading by word of mouth, Cooper then established a “Hatquarters” to field the hundreds of e-mail requests for help starting chapters. She now serves as “Exalted Queen Mother”, & has written two best-selling books about the Society.

The Red Hat Society membership increased through word of mouth, There are over 20,000 chapters in the United States & over 30 other countries growing from two chapters in 1999 to over 70,000 members.

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Jyoti Thomas

POD (Poem Of the Day)

~I drag the large stones to higher ground
I plant my seeds
& carry the balance of the elements
In my hands to bless them…
I linger with the moist black secret
Smell of earth…

~hag

Honeyed Soul

Poetry, Remembering, Rudolf Steiner Quote, Soul to Soul, Speaking with the Stars

24 April 2017 – Astro-Weather: For those who like to observe during the quiet predawn hours, Saturn offers a treat this week. The ringed planet rises around midnight & climbs some high in the south by the time morning twilight begins. It shines against the backdrop of northwestern Sagittarius, where it appears nearly stationary relative to the background stars

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Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day 

“Greek philosophy beautifully compared the human soul with a bee. The world of colour and light offers the soul honey which it brings with it into the higher world. The soul must spiritualize sense experience and carry it up into higher worlds.” ~Rudolf Steiner 1906

Jackie Lanng

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

479 BC – Thutmose III ascends to the throne of Egypt

1184 BC – Traditional date of the fall of Troy

1915 – The arrest of 250 Armenian intellectuals & community leaders in Istanbul marks the beginning of the Armenian Genocide

1904 – Birthday of Willem de Kooning, Dutch-American painter & educator

1942 – Birthday of Barbra Streisand, American singer, actress, & producer

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POD (Poem Of the Day)

~The Earth is an apple
Ripening in space…

~hag

Biocentric

Poetry, Quote, Remembering, Rudolf Steiner Quote, Soul to Soul, Speaking with the Stars, Spring

22 April 2017 – Astro-Weather: The weak Lyrid meteor shower peaks, near Bella Luna, a waning crescent.

The spring constellation Corvus, the Crow, perches in the southeast these evenings, about a fist & a half at arm’s length to the right of Spica. But above Spica this year is brilliant Jupiter, hogging the show. Corvus is traditionally seen as ready to snatch sparkling Spica out of Virgo’s hand

Titan

As dawn begins to brighten Sunday morning, catch Venus as she begins to show herself as the morning star next to the waning crescent Moon low in the east.

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Willa Selt

Music is the expression of the will of nature while all other arts are expressions of the idea of nature. ~Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

254 – Deathday of Origen (which means *child of Horus* -his nickname was  Adamantios which means *unconquerable*, *diamond*) – Church father considered a heretic because of his belief in reincarnation

1145 – the 19th recorded perihelion passage of Halley’s Comet

1451 – Birthday of Isabella I, of Castile, Queen of Spain

1724 – Birthday of philosopher Immanuel Kant

Odilon Redon

1840 – Birthday of painter Odilon Redon

a quote from the vedas

1904 – Birthday of physicist J.R. Oppenheimer

1915 – The use of poison gas in World War I escalates when chlorine gas is released as a chemical weapon in the Second Battle of Ypres

1945 –Prisoners at the Jasenovac concentration camp revolt. 520 are killed & around 80 escape

1945 –Führerbunker: After learning that Soviet forces have taken Eberswalde without a fight, Adolf Hitler admits defeat in his underground bunker & states that suicide is his only recourse

1954 – Red Scare: Witnesses begin testifying and live television coverage of the Army–McCarthy hearings begins

Bella Leuther

1970- 1st Earth Day  “There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.” ~Marshall McLuhan

“We can speak of Karma not only in the case of individual persons, for man should not consider himself as a single being. If the individual were to rise even a few miles above the earth, the result would be the same as if the finger severed itself from the body.

If we penetrate into spiritual science we are literally forced to admit through this knowledge that we should not delude ourselves to the extent of insisting that we are single beings. This applies to the physical world and even more to the spiritual world. Man belongs to the whole world and his destiny is involved with that of the entire world. Karma touches not only the individual, but also the life of whole nations.”

Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 100 – Theosophy and Rosicrucianism: Lecture VII: The Law of Karma – Kassel, 22nd June 1907

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Lua Abyssa

POD (Poem Of the Day)

~Will you
Sow the seeds of premonition
Into a fruitful action
To ignite the weave
In radiant expectation…?
~hag

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John Muir is remembered on Earthday (his birthday was April 21st1838 ) also known as “John of the Mountains”, an American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, glaciologist & early advocate for the preservation of wilderness in the United States. His letters, essays, & books describing his adventures in nature, especially in the Sierra Nevada, have been read by millions. His activism has helped to preserve the Yosemite Valley, Sequoia National Park & many other wilderness areas.

The Sierra Club, which he founded, is a prominent American conservation organization. The 211-mile John Muir hiking trail in the Sierra Nevada, was named in his honor, along with  Muir Woods National Monument, Muir Beach, John Muir College, Mount Muir, Camp Muir & Muir Glacier.

Muir was noted for being an ecological thinker, political spokesman, & religious prophet, whose writings became a personal guide into nature for countless individuals, making his name “almost ubiquitous” in the modern environmental consciousness.

During his lifetime John Muir published over 300 articles & 12 books. Muir has been called the “patron saint of the American wilderness” & its “archetypal free spirit.” As a dreamer & activist, his eloquent words changed the way Americans saw their mountains, forests, seashores, & deserts.

Muir exalted wild nature over human culture and civilization, believing that all life was sacred. He moved beyond the Transcendentalism of Emerson to a “biocentric perspective on the world”. He did so by describing the natural world as “a conductor of divinity,” & his writings often made nature synonymous with God.

My dear sisters & brothers, let’s make every day Earth Day!

XOX ~hag